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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28843563">reminiscence</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rgdivine/pseuds/rgdivine'>rgdivine</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, they go to daybreak town and talk about immortality</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 03:34:00</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,866</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28843563</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rgdivine/pseuds/rgdivine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>"What do you think?"<br/>"What do you want me to think?"<br/>"Aw, come on. That's cheating."</p>
</blockquote>rem·i·nis·cence<br/>noun: a story told about a past event remembered by the narrator.<p>The war is over, the monolith is back, and Xigbar is a little wistful, or as wistful as a Nobody can be, about the past he once had. He and Ansem tour the returned monolith of Daybreak Town and, as the sun sets over the hill overlooking the town, they look from the past to the future.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ansem Seeker of Darkness | Xehanort's Heartless/Xigbar</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>reminiscence</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shrimpsalad/gifts">Shrimpsalad</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>for maia. thank you so much, i love you! i had a great time writing for you and your reactions were the icing on the cake</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Up at the top of the hill, overlooking the city, it was quiet and peaceful, which is a far cry from the normal state of being of darkness or of the town and its wielders of light, but it was a welcome respite for Ansem and Xigbar. The sun was dying on the horizon, throwing itself into the sea, and the first look at dusk was creeping onto the pink-stained tapestry of the sky. Ansem was watching the town; Xigbar was watching him.</p><p>“What do you think?”</p><p>Ansem glanced over at him as he spoke, and Xigbar looked to the sunset as quickly as he could manage without making it seem like he was embarrassed to be caught staring. The Heartless was pretty entirely inscrutable unless he allowed otherwise—if he caught onto Xigbar’s haste, he wasn’t letting it show.</p><p>Instead, he said: “What do you want me to think?”</p><p>Xigbar huffed. “Aw, come on. That’s cheating.”</p><p>He was rewarded with a quiet laugh from Ansem as he turned his shoulders, then his torso, all the way towards him. His eyes had faded from a bright gold to a warm honey-brown in the last several months, and as Xigbar looked back towards him, gaze flickering from one eye to the other, there was a deep fondness lingering within them. It made the scraps of Xigbar’s heart fill with something unidentifiable.</p><p>“It’s not cheating,” Ansem said after a moment, the smile that he’d had when he laughed replaced by something smaller, softer. Xigbar wanted to look back at the sunset, not quite sure what to do with the way that he was looking at him, but he was caught in the honeypot of his gaze. “This is your home. I would like to do it justice in your mind.”</p><p>“I want your honest opinion,” He drawled back.</p><p>“My honest opinion is that I want you to like me.”</p><p>Xigbar snorted and broke eye contact, folding his arms and flopping back on the grass. Above him the sky was beginning to darken, spilled over with ink. “Well, you’ve got that either way.”</p><p>Ansem’s voice was even softer when he spoke, and Xigbar almost startled when there was a gentle touch on his hand; cool fingers wound with his. “I’m glad for that.” A foreign, pleasant shiver crawled over his skin.</p><p>Daybreak Town was home, but it has not always been the most welcoming, and today they’ve witnessed that side of it. Absence makes the heart fonder; in Luxu’s absence from Daybreak Town, in his travels through the rest of the connected worlds, through centuries of wandering, perhaps wistful nostalgia had become rose-tinted.</p><p>The city proper had seemed louder this time, than it had back then. Or perhaps, back then, it had seemed quiet because of how far he lived from most of the bustle. Time and distance had provided Xigbar with the wisdom to not be intimidated by the noise and the Keyblade children; where Luxu—having never been much of a <em>child</em> himself, lab-born as he was—might once have shied from them, unfamiliar with them, Xigbar strode confidently among them, and they parted like water in his path.</p><p>(It wasn’t like he tried to be frightening, or anything, but he was unknown, and it probably didn’t help that he walked at the side of a Heartless. Besides, it made things a little easier, if they went unbothered.)</p><p>Ansem, for as much as he ever seemed <em>on edge</em>, seemed so in the city. Twice Xigbar had to step between the Heartless and the wielders that were getting a little antsy about his presence and use his “stern Master” voice to direct their energies elsewhere.</p><p>In one such instance, as Xigbar returned to his side, Ansem wound his arm with Xigbar’s. “I confess, I am almost as nervous as they appear to be,” He had murmured in an undertone to his partner.</p><p>“Nah, nothin’ to be nervous about,” Xigbar chuckled back, but kept his voice quiet in deference. Daybreak Town, for all that it was a massive monolith, filled with foolhardy or brave children, rarely saw things outside of what it was used to. “They’re just curious.”</p><p>“Well, so long as I have you with me to protect me,” Ansem said, and Xigbar had found himself sputtering as the Heartless turned his head, hiding what <em>had</em> to be a smile, unable to tell if it was flirting or serious.</p><p>They had stopped and lingered for a while in the shadow of the belltower. It was empty, long empty, of both Foreteller and young Union Leader, but time, the unstoppable, immortal force that it was, coaxed the huge clock to continue its daily tolling. The clock-face was frozen at 11:59, and the Break never rose over the horizon.</p><p>Still, it had made a perfect place for storytelling. Most of the stories of Luxu’s childhood were old enough to be fairytales, and with as many lives as he’d lived, he told them almost as if they were, passed down from mouth to mouth and the details as obscured as they were almost completely made up.</p><p>Ansem had seemed entertained either way, mouth curled into a smile and listening with genuine interest, asking questions when he had them.</p><p>It had made Xigbar feel awfully <em>seen</em>.</p><p>Now as the sky was darkening, back up on the hill and feeling a little more like Luxu, he leaned back and folded his arm, the one whose hand was not still clutching onto Ansem’s, beneath his head. The grass tickled his elbow and curled against his neck, brushing soft the way that coming home feels, and he gazed at the sky, which was much darker now than it was only minutes ago.</p><p>It was the same sky that he had grown up under; through centuries wearing different faces and answering to different names, it had always been the same sky, with different patterns of stars that were starting to fill the sky of Daybreak Town, making it almost day-bright. Once upon a time, he had watched them blink out one by one, but by that time, he carried a blade with no name and a box about whose secrets he was sworn to silence.</p><p>Before that, he had been Luxu, just Luxu, his Master’s first apprentice.</p><p>Growing up in the tower had been a childhood in fits and snatches: arguing with Ava, teasing Aced, and hours, hours the way the loneliness can stretch, the sound of cicadas outside and the distant, far-off calls of the Keyblade children as they finish their missions, gather with each other, with their Unions and for a long time outside their unions, hours spent staring out a window out to the distance. Hours, or minutes.</p><p>They didn’t speak of death in the tower. Not that the topic was forbidden, but it seemed so irrelevant. As long as there had been a Daybreak Town, there had been the Master, and before that there was nothing, nothing so far as any of them could find. The Master was the beginning and the end of all things, and until he started to speak of disappearing, there was hardly—hardly a realization that things could end and still continue.</p><p>Then there was a war, and then Luxu was <em>really</em> alone, for hours in the way that hours turn to years turn to decades.</p><p>Xigbar didn’t often feel, anymore, like much was left of Luxu. In a lot of ways, he figured Ansem was a lot like him, this way included. They are not-quite-people, forsaken to not-quite-death, an end that never comes. Heartless don’t seem to die unless they’re killed, and much like Ansem, Xigbar seemed to be missing some quintessential part like that.</p><p>(In a lot of ways, too, Luxu felt a little responsible for Ansem’s entire existence. Xehanort was his creation, a scapegoat, a destined thing he created, played off that friend of his in a poetic clash of light and dark, and there were no innocent lives, not anymore, but Ansem and Xemnas were not Xehanort, although they were pieces of him and not a whole.)</p><p>Ansem could read him too well. He tugged at Xigbar’s wrist.</p><p>“You’re thinking really loudly.”</p><p>Xigbar snorted. “Oh, my bad.”</p><p>Ansem made a sound that might have been a stifled laugh, and his thumb traced nonsense patterns on the back of Xigbar’s hand, against the time-roughened skin. This was the hill where he had told Ava who the traitor was, and it was the hill where he had watched the last Union Leader watch Daybreak Town crumble into the ocean, and it was the hill where he’d said into the eye of the blade that wasn’t his, <em>I don’t know if I can do this,</em> but like data overwriting older lines, it was the hill where he sat with another almost-real being and watched the sun set.</p><p>“Munny for your thoughts,” The Heartless prompted when Xigbar didn’t continue speaking. When he glanced up, his companion was holding a munny orb between two elegant fingers, and he offered it half in jest. Xigbar snorted again, taking the orb, but acquiesced after a moment of gathering his thoughts.</p><p>“I’ve lived a long time, y’know?” He said, turning the munny in his fingers. “It’s not really something that I ever really <em>had</em> to think about, but now that the war is over—y’know, it’s gonna haf’ta end sometime soon.”</p><p>It’s even more depressing once its out in the air, but Ansem, never as rash as his younger counterpart or any full human Xigbar’s ever had the dubious privilege to know, just hummed. There was no sinking in his stomach; his torn-up heart didn’t cringe from his thoughtful silence.</p><p>“Well,” Ansem said after another pause. “I’d like to be with you. As long as I can be.” He said that, then together they fell into silence again.</p><p>Silence, as Xigbar turned the words over in his head. <em>I’d like to be with you. </em>Somewhere on the edge of eternity, there was a place of water and sky, a place Luxu was well acquainted with, a place as silent as the silence that stretched between them, as silent as immortality. Someday he would go there, and someday he would pass right through. It was silence, now, but it was companionable silence. It wasn’t unkind nor</p><p>After a short time, Ansem stood, pulling Xigbar to a sitting position. The light from the sky, the fading remnants of dusk and the stars that winked down at them from the midnight blue tapestry of the sky, threw a soft line of light over his features.</p><p>“I think this town is full of light,” He said. “And it is grand and impressive.”</p><p>“But?”</p><p>Ansem graced him with a smile. Looking up at him, mostly-silhouetted by the ink-dark sky, Luxu was struck with the thought that this must have been what the early wielders saw, in the moments before a fight, the breathtaking sight that spawned the legends of the great Heartless. Stunned, it was all he could do to breathe.</p><p>“It may have been good for Luxu, but I think it is too small for Xigbar.”</p><p>He held his hand out. Xigbar took it.</p>
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